A Journey of A Thousand Steps: Go-live and Beyond
Continuous improvement includes processes and software. Your Salesforce & Certinia roadmap should align with business objectives to ensure success after going live.
Transitioning business systems can be a major disruptor to your organization. Ideally it is an effective and seamless process that delivers confidence to your organization and ensures long-term success.
Go-live is just the first step. The question we address today is how your organization ensures long-term success.
At The Apricity Group, our team is the only Salesforce partner dedicated to Certinia Support. We specialize in helping customers navigate adoption confidently and effectively.
It is uncommon for implementation partners to discuss post go-live support prior or during an engagement. This is typically due to sales teams wanting to prevent awareness of additional cost of ownership. However, like any business tool, your business systems need to maintain relevancy to changing business environments and requirements.
Planning Post-Go-Live Support
Support planning starts with reviewing the delta between your current state and desired future state. This ensures your team clearly understands how processes and systems should intersect. Once the future state is clearly defined, we identify the the end users and key stakeholders responsible to the roadmap. For example, not all Certinia Professional Services Automation (PSA) teams are structured the same. We work with customers to identify who will manage critical functions such as project setup, billing, project management, and resource management.
The goal is to align process with a designated support resource. Designated resources should have technical experience with the business functions they support. However, in some organizations, resources may wear a few hats. For example, some organizations have a single resource perform project creation and resource management, others have a dedicated, or several, resource managers. Regardless, it’s essential that the support team is properly identified to help accelerate resolutions to any issues that may arise.
Preventing “The Valley of Death”: End User Training and Adoption
Adoption is one of the most common pitfalls when changing business systems. Systems integrators call the post go-live phase, “The Valley of Death”! To avoid this issue, we maintain a two-pronged approach to adoption; training and executive buy-in.
One aspect of successful adoption is end-user training. The reality is that if your team doesn’t use the system, it isn’t providing any value. End-users often lack the training and enablement to ensure successful adoption. We start by identifying training deficiencies and then tailor training programs according to user roles.
The second aspect of successful adoption is maintaining executive buy-in. Keeping executives informed of progress and the impact to the organization is essential. At The Apricity Group, we schedule Quarterly High Fives to ensure our engagement is aligned with business objectives and executive stakeholders. Quarterly High Fives include a review of current business objectives, project progress, project budget, and outstanding deliverables.
Our approach engages all key stakeholders, including end-users and executives. The goal is developing a simple system for users to adopt, increasing communication and shortening the learning curve.
New Release, New Opportunity
Salesforce and Certinia have 3 major annual releases: Spring, Summer and Fall. We help clients understand each release and how new functionality may help further enable their organization. Separately, business environments are constantly changing. This has a tendency to impact priorities and business objectives. Our team takes a proactive approach to understanding current challenges and the impact to your systems and processes. We perform a thorough analysis of existing challenges and leverage new functionality to address them accordingly.
Thoroughly understanding your organization allows our team to provide tailored recommendations for enhancements. These recommendations often involve utilizing the latest Salesforce or Certinia features, optimizing business processes, or reducing technical debt. Our proactive approach minimizes the delta between identifying an issue and implementing a solution.
Go-live is Just Beginning
A new business system can be daunting for organizations. The good news is that Salesforce and Certinia are relatively flexible. We believe that proper planning, partners, and support, enable businesses to adapt successfully. We ensure our clients can confidently navigate their system by providing proper training, including key stakeholders, and ensuring your processes are simple and scaleable.
At The Apricity Group, we are here to ensure proper planning, effective support, and a commitment to maximizing the business value of your Salesforce and Certinia business systems.
